Jan Eric Lenssen (Senior Researcher)

In this work, we introduce Scribbles for All, a label and training data
generation algorithm for semantic segmentation trained on scribble labels.
Training or fine-tuning semantic segmentation models with weak supervision has
become an important topic recently and was subject to significant advances in
model quality. In this setting, scribbles are a promising label type to achieve
high quality segmentation results while requiring a much lower annotation
effort than usual pixel-wise dense semantic segmentation annotations. The main
limitation of scribbles as source for weak supervision is the lack of
challenging datasets for scribble segmentation, which hinders the development
of novel methods and conclusive evaluations. To overcome this limitation,
Scribbles for All provides scribble labels for several popular segmentation
datasets and provides an algorithm to automatically generate scribble labels
for any dataset with dense annotations, paving the way for new insights and
model advancements in the field of weakly supervised segmentation. In addition
to providing datasets and algorithm, we evaluate state-of-the-art segmentation
models on our datasets and show that models trained with our synthetic labels
perform competitively with respect to models trained on manual labels. Thus,
our datasets enable state-of-the-art research into methods for scribble-labeled
semantic segmentation. The datasets, scribble generation algorithm, and
baselines are publicly available at github.com/wbkit/Scribbles4All

Transformers have become the predominant architecture in foundation models
due to their excellent performance across various domains. However, the
substantial cost of scaling these models remains a significant concern. This
problem arises primarily from their dependence on a fixed number of parameters
within linear projections. When architectural modifications (e.g., channel
dimensions) are introduced, the entire model typically requires retraining from
scratch. As model sizes continue growing, this strategy results in increasingly
high computational costs and becomes unsustainable. To overcome this problem,
we introduce TokenFormer, a natively scalable architecture that leverages the
attention mechanism not only for computations among input tokens but also for
interactions between tokens and model parameters, thereby enhancing
architectural flexibility. By treating model parameters as tokens, we replace
all the linear projections in Transformers with our token-parameter attention
layer, where input tokens act as queries and model parameters as keys and
values. This reformulation allows for progressive and efficient scaling without
necessitating retraining from scratch. Our model scales from 124M to 1.4B
parameters by incrementally adding new key-value parameter pairs, achieving
performance comparable to Transformers trained from scratch while greatly
reducing training costs. Code and models are available at
\url{https://github.com/Haiyang-W/TokenFormer}.

We present TOCH, a method for refining incorrect 3D hand-object interaction
sequences using a data prior. Existing hand trackers, especially those that
rely on very few cameras, often produce visually unrealistic results with
hand-object intersection or missing contacts. Although correcting such errors
requires reasoning about temporal aspects of interaction, most previous work
focus on static grasps and contacts. The core of our method are TOCH fields, a
novel spatio-temporal representation for modeling correspondences between hands
and objects during interaction. The key component is a point-wise
object-centric representation which encodes the hand position relative to the
object. Leveraging this novel representation, we learn a latent manifold of
plausible TOCH fields with a temporal denoising auto-encoder. Experiments
demonstrate that TOCH outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D hand-object
interaction models, which are limited to static grasps and contacts. More
importantly, our method produces smooth interactions even before and after
contact. Using a single trained TOCH model, we quantitatively and qualitatively
demonstrate its usefulness for 1) correcting erroneous reconstruction results
from off-the-shelf RGB/RGB-D hand-object reconstruction methods, 2) de-noising,
and 3) grasp transfer across objects. We will release our code and trained
model on our project page at virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/toch/